Lamont University Professor of Economics, Harvard
University.In his engaging essays from The
Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity
(Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2005), Nobel
Laureate Dr. Amartya Sen
lucidly explains the strategy behind the attempts of Hindutva
supporters to re-invent India’s history, an effort that has
now
unfortunately reached the shores of California via organizations such
the Vedic Foundation and the Hindu Education Foundation. Those who seek
a broader understanding of the sectarian motivations behind the edits
submitted by these organizations may wish to read Sen’s
excellent
book, excerpts from which are presented here. Please note that the
underlined sentences reflect our emphases and not those in the original
text.

The elaborate presentation of alternative points of views draws
attention to the plurality of perspectives and arguments, and this
tradition of accom­modating heterodoxy
receives…extensive
support within well-established Hindu documents (for example in the
fourteenth-century study Sarvadarsanasamgraha
(`Collection of All Philosophies'), where sixteen contrary and
competing viewpoints are sequentially presented in as many chapters).
(p47)

In contrast with this large view, many
Hindu political activists today seem bent on doing away with the broad
and tolerant parts of the Hindu tradition in favour of a uniquely
ascertained - and often fairly crude - view which, they demand, must be
accepted by all. The piously belligerent army of Hindu politics would
rather take us away from these engagingly thoughtful discussions and
would have us embrace instead their much-repeated public
proclamations... (p47-48)

It is sufficient to note here that there is a well-established
capacious view of a broad and generous Hinduism, which contrasts
sharply with the narrow and bellicose versions that are currently on
political offer, led particularly by parts of the Hindutva movement.
(p49)

In the early years after independence, the broad and inclusive concept
of an Indian identity which had emerged during the long struggle for
freedom commanded sweeping allegiance. The determi­nation to
preserve that capacious identity was strengthened by the deep sense of
tragedy associated with the partitioning of the subcon­tinent,
and
also by considerable national pride in the fact that despite the
political pressure for `an exchange of people, the bulk of the large
Muslim population in independent India chose to stay in India rather
than move to Pakistan. (p51)

It is this spacious and absorptive idea of Indianness that
has
been severely challenged over recent decades…it can be said
that
the movement sees Hindutva (liter­ally, `the quality of
Hinduism')
as a quintessential guide to `Indianness'. (p51)

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the political party that represents
the Hindutva movement in the Indian parliament, was in office in New
Delhi between 1998 and 2004, through leading a coalition
govern­ment, until its electoral defeat in May
2004…Although
Hinduism is an ancient religion, Hindutva is quite a recent political
movement. A political party called the `Hindu Mahasabha' did exist
before India's independence, and its successor, the `Jan Sangh',
commanded the loyalty of a small proportion of Hindus. But neither
party was a political force to reckon with in the way the BJP and its
associates have now become. (p49)

Even though the BJP is no longer dominant, in the way it was over the
last few years, it remains a politically powerful force, and is
work­ing hard to return to office before long. (p50)

The
BJP gets
political support from a modest minority of Indians, and, no less to
the point, a limited minority of the Hindus….the proportion
of
total votes in Indian parliamentary elections that the BJP has
maximally managed to get has been only about 26 per cent…in
a
country where more than 80 per cent of the total population happen to
belong to the Hindu community. It is certainly not the party of choice
of most Hindus - far from it. (p51-52)

The Hindutva movement has had a strong effect on recent political
developments in India, and has added very substantially to the
poli­tics of sectarianism. It is therefore
important to investigate the nature of the intellectual claims it makes
and the arguments it presents.
Since the Hindutva movement has been accompanied by violent physical
actions, including the killing and terrorizing of minorities (as
happened in Bombay in 1992-3 and in Gujarat in 2002), it is difficult
to have patience with its intellectual beliefs and public
proclamations. (p53)

The
first difficulty is that a
secular democracy which gives equal room to every citizen irrespective
of religious background cannot be fairly defined in terms of the
majority religion of the country. There is a difference
between
a constitutionally secular nation with a majority Hindu population and
a theocratic Hindu state that might see Hinduism as its official
religion (Nepal comes closer to the latter description than does
India). Furthermore, no matter what the official standing of any
community as a group may be, the status of individ­ual citizens
cannot be compromised by the smallness (if that is the case) of the
group to which he or she belongs. (p54)

While the statistics of Hindu majority are indeed correct, the use of
the statistical argument for seeing India as a pre-eminently Hindu
country is based on a conceptual confusion: our religion is not our
only identity, nor necessarily the identity to which we attach the
greatest importance. (p56)

Certainly, the ancientness of the Hindu tradition cannot be disputed.
However, other religions, too, have had a long history in India, which
has been, for a very long time indeed, a multi-religious country,
making room for many different faiths and beliefs. Aside from the
obvious and prominent presence of Muslims in India for well over a
millennium (Muslim Arab traders settled in India from the eighth
century), India
was not a
`Hindu country' even before the arrival of Islam. Buddhism was the
dominant religion in India for nearly a millennium. Indeed, Chinese
scholars regularly described India as `the Buddhist kingdom'. (p56)

History is an active field of intellectual engagement for the Hindutva
movement, and parts of that movement have been very involved in the
rewriting of history…What is its specific relevance in
contemporary Indian politics, and why is Hindutva
poli­tics so keen on redescribing the past? (p62)

The
rewriting of
India's history serves the dual purpose of playing a role in providing
a common basis for the diverse membership of the Sangh Parivar, and of
helping to get fresh recruits to Hindu political activism, especially
from the diaspora. It has thus become a major priority in
the
politics of Hindutva in contemporary India. Following the electoral
victory of coalitions led by the BJP in 1998 and 1999, various arms of
the government of India were mobilized in the task of arranging
`appropriate' rewritings of Indian history. Even though this adventure
of inventing a past is no longer `official' (because of the defeat of
the BJP-led coalition in the general elections in the spring of 2004),
that highly charged episode is worth recollecting both because of what
it tells us about the abuse of temporal power and also because of the
light it throws on the intellectual underpinning of the Hindutva
movement. (p63)

The rapidly reorganized National Council of Educational Research and
Training (NCERT) became busy, from shortly after the BJP's assumption
of office, not only in producing fresh textbooks for Indian school
children, but also in deleting sections from books produced earlier by
NCERT itself (under pre-BJP management), written by reputed Indian
historians. The `reorganization' of NCERT was accompanied by an
`overhaul' of the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), with
new officers being appointed and a new agenda chosen for both, mainly
in line with the priorities of the Hindutva movement. (p63)

The speed of the attempted textbook revision had to be so fast that the
newly reconstituted NCERT evidently had some difficulty in
find­ing
historians to do this task who would be both reasonably
distin­guished and adequately compliant. In the early school
textbooks that emanated from the NCERT, there was not only the
predictable sectarian bias in the direction of the politics of
`Hindutva', but also numerous factual mistakes of a fairly
straightforward kind. School children were to be taught, in one of the
textbooks, that Madagascar was `an island in the Arabian sea and that
Lancashire had been `a fast-growing industrial town'. (p64)

Indeed, in addition to the plethora of innocuous confusions and silly
mistakes, there were also serious omissions and lapses in the
government-sponsored Indian history. For example, one
of the text­books that was meant to teach Indian school
children
about the events surrounding India's independence failed to mention the
assassination of Mahatma Gandhi by Nathuram Godse, the Hindu political
fanatic who had links with the activist RSS (the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak
Sangh) - an omission of very considerable moment. More
generally, the accounts given in these textbooks of the fight for
India's inde­pendence were powerfully prejudiced in the
direction
of the politics of Hindutva. (p64)

Despite the understandable panic, it was never easy to see how the
Hindutva movement could succeed in making Indians accept a
`re­invented past', no matter how much control they might have
had
over educational policies in New Delhi. The
redrawing of India's history using the Hindutva lens suffers from some
deep empirical problems as well as conceptual tensions.
(p65)

Given the priorities of Hindutva, the rewriting of India's history
tends to favour internal and external isolation, in the form of
separ­ating out the celebration of Hindu achievements from the
non-Hindu parts of its past and also from intellectual and cultural
developments outside India. (p65)

The problem starts with the account of the very beginning of India's
history. The `Indus valley civilization', dating from the third
millen­nium BCE, flourished well before the timing of the
earliest
Hindu liter­ature, the Vedas, which are typically dated in the
middle of the second millennium BCE. The Indus civilization, or the
Harappa civilization as it is sometimes called (in honour of its most
famous site), covered much of the north-west of the undivided
subcontinent (including what are today Punjab, Haryana, Sindh,
Baluchistan, western Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Gujarat) - a much
larger area than Mesopo­tamia and Egypt, which flourished at
about
the same time. It had many special achievements, including remarkable
town planning, organized storage (of grain in particular), and
extraordinary drainage systems (unequalled, if I am any judge, in the
subcontinent in the following four thousand years). (p65)

There is obvious material here for national or civilizational pride of
Indians. But this poses an immediate problem for the Hindutva view of
India's history, since an
ancient civilization-that is clearly pre-­Sanskritic and
pre-Hindu
deeply weakens the possibility of seeing Indian history in
pre-eminently and constitutively Hindu terms. (p66)

Furthermore, there is a second challenge associated with India's
ancient past, which relates to the arrival of the Indo-Europeans
(some­times called Aryans) from the West, most likely in the
second
millen­nium BCE, riding horses (unknown in the Indus valley
civilization), and speaking a variant of early Sanskrit (the Vedic
Sanskrit, as it is now called). The
Hindutva view of history, which traces the origin of Indian
civilization to the Vedas has, therefore, the double `difficulty' of
(1) having to accept that the foundational basis of Hindu culture came
originally from outside India, and (2) being unable to place Hinduism
at the beginning of Indian cultural history and its urban heritage.
(p66)

Thus, in the Hindutva theory, much hangs on the genesis of the Vedas.
In particular: who composed them (it would be best for Hindutva theory
if they were native Indians, settled in India for thou­sands of
years, rather than Indo-Europeans coming from abroad)? Were they
composed later than the Indus valley civilization (it would be best if
they were not later, in sharp contrast with the accepted knowledge)?...There
were, therefore, attempts by the Hindutva champions to rewrite Indian
history in such a way that these disparate difficulties are
simultaneously removed through the simple device of `making' the
Sanskrit-speaking com­posers of the Vedas also the very same
people
who created the Indus valley civilization! (p67)

The Indus valley civilization was accordingly renamed `the
Indus-Saraswati civilization', in honour of a non-observable river
called the Sarasvati which is referred to in the Vedas. The
intellectual origins of Hindu philosophy as well as of the concocted
Vedic science and Vedic mathematics are thus put solidly into the third
millennium BCE, if not earlier. Indian school children were then made
to read about this highly theoretical `Indus-Saraswati civilization' in
their new history textbooks, making Hindu culture - and Hindu science -
more ancient, more urban, more indigenous, and comfortably omnipresent
throughout India's civilizational history. (p67)

The
problem with
this account is, of course, its obvious falsity, going against all the
available evidence based on archaeology and lit­erature. To
meet
that difficulty, `new' archaeological evidence had to be marshalled.
This was done - or claimed to be done - in a much­ publicized
book by Natwar Jha and N. S. Rajaram called The Deciphered Indus Script,
published in 2000. The authors claim that they have deciphered the
as-yet-undeciphered script used in the Indus valley, which they
attribute to the mid-fourth millennium BCE - stretching the `history'
unilaterally back by a further thousand years or so. They also claim
that the tablets found there refer to Rigveda's
Sarasvati river (in the indirect form of `Ila surrounds the blessed
land'). Further, they produced a picture of a terracotta seal with a
horse on it, which was meant to be further proof of the Vedic - and
Aryan - identity of the Indus civilization. The Vedas are full of
refer­ences to horses, whereas the Indus remains have plenty of
bulls but - so it was hitherto thought - no horses. (p67-68)

The alleged discovery and decipherment led to a vigorous debate about
the claims, and
the upshot was the demonstration that there was, in fact, no
decipherment whatever, and that the horse seal is the result of a
simple fraud based on a computerized distortion of a broken seal of a
unicorn bull, which was known earlier. The alleged horse
seal
was a distinct product of the late twentieth century, the credit for
the creation of which has to go to the Hindutva activists. The
definitive demonstration of the fraud came from Michael Witzel,
Professor of Sanskrit at Harvard University, in a joint essay with
Steve Farmer. The demonstration did not, however, end references in
offi­cial school textbooks (produced by the NCERT during the
BJP-led rule, ending only in May 2004) to `terracotta figurines' of
horses in the `Indus-Saraswati civilization'. (p68)

It
is difficult
to understand fully why a movement that began with pride in Hindu
values, in which the pursuit of truth plays such a big part, should
produce activists who would try to have their way not only through
falsity but through carefully crafted fraud. (p68)

In trying to invent Indian history to suit the prejudices of Hindutva,
the movement took on a profoundly contrary task. The task is
particu­larly hard to achieve given what is known about India's
long history. The
unadorned truth does not favour the Hindutva view, and the adorned
falsity does not survive critical scrutiny. (p69)

Through
their
attempts to encourage and exploit separatism, the Hindutva movement has
entered into a con­frontation with the idea of India itself.
This
is nothing short of a sus­tained effort to miniaturize the
broad
idea of a large India - proud of its heterodox past and its pluralist
present - and to replace it by the stamp of a small India, bundled
around a drastically downsized version of Hinduism. In the
confrontation between a large and a small India, the broader
understanding can certainly win. But….Cognizance of India's
past
is important for an adequate understanding of the capa­cious
idea
of India. (p72)